Re: Google and Verizon DID do a deal for new internet 'first class' superhighway Rea
Actually, I trust history and the Telecomm's own words.
Look historically at what has happened with other mediums that were more easily accessible by the public on their inception and then became regulated by the corporations running them...TV, Radio, and the print media. All of them became less and less a place where the ideas and voices of the average people could be shared and more and more what was pushed on us by the corporations that ran them. And I have nothing against that, those things pretty much functioned in that way from very early on.
The internet, since its open inception, till this point, has grown because of the open access and easy ability to be used by ANYONE. You could have the most idiotic hobby known to man, make a website for it, throw it up, and there's a good chance because of the openness of the internet other people that share your strange idiotic hobby will actually find you and a community can form. It is an open forum of ideas unable to be mimicked in any form of communication save person to person. It is actually the best way for mass assembly of any kind by the populace due to the current size of the world and our country and the population spread within it.
To give you some examples that are either already being tried, or have actually been stated to show their intent:
The Washington Post said:
William L. Smith, chief technology officer for Atlanta-based BellSouth Corp., told reporters and analysts that an Internet service provider such as his firm should be able, for example, to charge Yahoo Inc. for the opportunity to have its search site load faster than that of Google Inc.
This is the first step to a tiered system that will effectively remove the greatest ability of the internet, its neutrality that allows everyone a voice. Instead, the major corporations will be given incredibly high speeds while things created independently will go for a crawl. Who needs Debate Politics...we can all go to Y! Politics, monitored by Yahoo, moderated by Yahoo, set with Yahoo's rules and things.
Verizon's Ivan Seidenberg told the Wall Street Journal said:
We have to make sure they don't sit on our network and chew up our capacity. We need to pay for the pipe.
Now, never mind that the Telecomm companies are getting LARGE subsidies from the government to create those "pipes", money coming from...oh that's right...WE THE PEOPLE. But this is very much showing what they're thinking. If you're not on their network, or not accessing a site on their network, then you will have to pay more to do whatever it is you're doing. When that happens, other companies do it as well. This conglomerates things where everything is compartmentalized on their own mini-networks or you're paying unbelievably stupid amounts of money.
This is not people worried about some "Hypothetical" They are flat out telling us what it is they want to do.
To give you some other examples already attempted:
- In 2005, Canada's telephone giant Telus blocked customers from visiting a Web site sympathetic to the Telecommunications Workers Union during a contentious labor dispute.
- In April, Time Warner's AOL blocked all emails that mentioned
EchoDitto -- an advocacy campaign opposing the company's pay-to-send e-mail scheme.
- Shaw, a major Canadian cable, internet, and telephone service company, intentionally downgrades the "quality and reliability" of competing Internet-phone services that their customers might choose -- driving customers to their own phone services not through better services, but by rigging the marketplace.
They not only want us to pay to use their network, but they then want to tell us what we can and can not do with that service we're paying for. The path their taking us down will destroy the two-way nature of the internet.
This isn't about "politicians". This isn't politicians pushing this movement, it is every day people coming together. This was something the politicians and Telecomms were trying to slide through quickly and quietly thinking no one would notice...and the people stood up and said "WTF, No!"
The digital "super highway" is a great analogy for it. The "Pipes" they "own" are fundamental to the digital transportation of all information in our country, it is why they are given amazing amounts of TAX PAYER MONEY to maintain, upgrade, and keep those "pipes" going. People do not have a problem with them mandating a price for a certain over all speed....its done now, that's fine, it makes sense. But when it starts getting to where they begin to segment the internet, that's where the problem is.